“THE GHOST TRAIN"

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 20 October 1927, Page 9

“THE GHOST TRAIN"

A WONDERFUL PLAY

J. C. Williamson, Ltd., in conjunction with Mr. E. J. Carroll, presented Arnold Ridley's much-discussed com-edy-drama, “The Ghost Train,” to a capacity house in the Hastings Municipal Theatre last night. The play is weird and wonderful in its structure, telling of a disaster to a train, some years previously, at a lonely railway station and of the current belief that the ghost of the train, with its ghostly driver, thunders past the station at midnight’on each anniversary of the catastrophe, A party of travellers, missing their train connection, find themselves marooned, and so compelled to accommodate themselves as best they can in the backblock station, on one of those fateful nights during a driving storm. The story is woven from their horrifying experiences while waiting for and suffering the appalling passage of the “Ghost Train,” which is the climax of a series of preliminary hair-raising and gruesome incidents,‘calculated to cause even a prosaic audience to experience a jumpy feeling and the more highly-strung to voice a smothered scream. Certainly the' passage of the tram was a triumph in dramatic and mechanical stage effect and the gradually increasing clamour and vibration of the approaching terror, culminating in the red glare of the engine, the scream of escaping steam, the grind of the brakes, the clang of machinery and the terrific uproar of the actual passage, stiffened many of the audience in their scats. The many ‘‘.spooky” situations were relieved by light interludes, which served to temper the uncanny creepiness of the general atmosphere .and at the close the story reassures the audience with a satisfactory explanation of the whole ghastly affair, sending them home in a frame of mind which, at least, enabled them to sleep in peace.